NextWeb – Startup pitches round 4 (Day 2)

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Symbaloo
A new take on the personal home page with the weirdest interface you’ve ever seen. Search and discovery. Wayfinding on the Wbe. There is a lot of volume on traditional start pages. their concept is visual (squares), then personalised (buttons?!), drag and drop. No banners or sponsored content. Sell traffic to partner sand affiliates, but they don’t steer people, though may suggest editorially. (Pitch verdict: OK, faitly clear. Again, looking for funding or not? Say why are you pitching! Isn’t this just Netvibes with logos!?)

Beezebox
The Paris startup enables companies to ‘engage with their communities’ on social networks. Mobile, fixed convergent platform mixed B2B B2C model (though they are vague about that this means). The ISP plays for branded social media. E.G. CRM 2.0 application for a mobile provider. Beetnic: Country based social media sevices. (Pitch Verdict: an entusiastic pitch but what on earth is the point in yet another social network and one which is very poor?)

Goojet
Launching next month is a Mobie widgets. They pitched at Le Web 3. (Verdict: Now, the pitch wasn’t that useful and the guy ran out of time (Why? They know how lin they have to pitch?!). Only after he’d finished did he say it was a drag and drop interface for adding apps to your phone. So I’ll have to explain: It’s an online/mobile platform designed for low to high-spec handsets and enables you to customise your phone by organizing your “mobile space” with picture galleries, notes, message board, voting, RSS feeds, status messages and weather forecasts. You drag these widgets onto your Goojet portal and you’ll find them appearing in your phone’s Goojet menu. Goojet allows users to create their own services and they can share them with friends or with the Goojet community.

Hoera
System which monitors data about people and brands brands in social networks. Demo is not yet live but the demo’d their social media monitor which is real-time data about the social network in one screen. Has some pretty interesting graphing capabilities (Verdict: Is this a kind’ve FriendFeed idea? No. But it seemed to have some good tools).

Soocial
Started with a video of Knight Rider trying to get Kit to call the Foundation but realising he hadn’t sync’d his phone. Soocial is syncs contacts between your devices and the web (and social networks, but it’s not a network itself, as Plaxo is becoming). They are solving the problem of contacts, not “friends”. Business model: not very formed buy maybe pay a small fee for syncing more than 500 contacts. Verdict: The most entertaining pitch so far! Who knows if they have a model but I linked the founder. At last, some energy.